Ladies and gentlemen, I really have
to ask you to seriously consider what you’ve heard, and now this is the end of
the evening so to speak. I heard a prize fight manager say to his fellow who was
losing badly, “David, listen to me. It’s not what’s he’s doing to you. It’s what
you’re not doing."

Ladies and gentlemen, these people
set -- they opened the doors, they gave us the right, and today, ladies and
gentlemen, in our cities and public schools we have 50% drop out. In our own
neighborhood, we have men in prison. No longer is a person embarrassed because
they’re pregnant without a husband. No longer is a boy considered an
embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried
child.

Ladies and gentlemen, the lower
economic and lower middle economic people are not holding their end in this
deal. In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on.
In the old days, you couldn’t hooky school because every drawn shade was an eye.
And before your mother got off the bus and to the house, she knew exactly where
you had gone, who had gone into the house, and where you got on whatever you had
one and where you got it from. Parents don’t know that today.

I’m talking about these people who
cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he
was two? Where were you when he was twelve? Where were you when he was eighteen,
and how come you don’t know he had a pistol? And where is his father, and why
don’t you know where he is? And why doesn’t the father show up to talk to this
boy?

The church is only open on Sunday.
And you can’t keep asking Jesus to ask doing things for you. You
can’t keep asking that God will find a way. God is tired of you. God was there
when they won all those cases -- fifty in a row. That’s
where God was because these people were doing something. And God said, “I’m
going to find a way.” I wasn’t there when God said it -- I’m making this up. But it sounds like what God would do.

We cannot blame white people. White
people -- White people don’t live over there. They close up the shop
early. The Korean ones still don’t know us as well -- they stay open 24 hours.

I’m looking and I see a man named
Kenneth Clark, he and his wife Mamie. Kenneth’s still alive. I have to apologize
to him for these people because Kenneth said it straight. He said you have to
strengthen yourselves, and we’ve got to have that black doll. And everybody said
it. Julian Bond said it. Dick Gregory said it. All these lawyers said it. And
you wouldn’t know that anybody had done a damned thing.

Fifty percent drop out rate, I’m
telling you, and people in jail, and women having children by five, six
different men. Under what excuse? I want somebody to love me. And as soon as you
have it, you forget to parent. Grandmother, mother, and great grandmother in the
same room, raising children, and the child knows nothing about love or respect
of any one of the three of them. All this child knows is “gimme, gimme, gimme.” These people want to buy the friendship of a child, and the child
couldn’t care less. Those of us sitting out here who have gone on to some
college or whatever we’ve done, we still fear our parents. And these people are not parenting. They’re buying things for the
kid -- $500 sneakers -- for what? They won’t buy or spend $250 on Hooked on Phonics.

Kenneth Clark, somewhere in his
home in upstate New York -- just looking ahead. Thank God he doesn’t know what’s
going on. Thank God. But these people -- the ones up here in the balcony fought so
hard. Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals. These are
people going around stealing Coca Cola. People getting shot in the back of the
head over a piece of pound cake! Then we all run out and are outraged: “The cops
shouldn’t have shot him.” What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his
hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as
anybody else. And I looked at it and I had no money. And something
called parenting said if you get caught with it you’re going to embarrass your
mother." Not, "You’re going to get your butt kicked." No. "You’re going to embarrass
your mother." "You’re going to embarrass your family." If you knock that girl up, you’re going
to have to run away because it’s going to be too embarrassing for your family.
In the old days, a girl getting pregnant had to go down South, and then her
mother would go down to get her. But the mother had the baby. I said the mother
had the baby. The girl didn’t have a baby. The mother had the baby in two weeks.
We are not parenting.

Ladies and gentlemen, listen to these people.
They are showing you what’s wrong. People putting their clothes on backwards.
Isn’t that a sign of something going on wrong? Are you not paying attention?
People
with their hat on backwards, pants down around the crack. Isn’t that a sign of
something or are you waiting for Jesus to pull his pants up? Isn’t it a sign of something when she’s got her dress all the way up
to the crack -- and got all kinds of needles and things going through her body.
What part of Africa did this come from? We are not Africans. Those
people are not Africans; they don’t know a damned thing about Africa. With names
like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed and all that crap and all of them are in jail.
(When we give these kinds names to our children, we give them the strength and
inspiration in the meaning of those names. What’s the point of giving them
strong names if there is not parenting and values backing it up).

Brown versus the Board of Education
is no longer the white person’s problem. We’ve got to take the neighborhood
back. We’ve got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the
Peace Corps. It’s right around the corner. It’s standing on the corner. It can’t
speak English. It doesn’t want to speak English. I can’t even talk the way these
people talk: “Why you ain’t where you is go ra?” I don’t
know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to
talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to
English. Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these
knuckleheads. You can’t land a plane with, “Why you ain’t…” You can’t be a doctor
with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that
kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they’re moving ahead
on this. Well, they know they’re not; they’re just hanging out in the same
place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you’re just supposed
to stay there long enough to get a job and move out.

Now, look, I’m telling you. It’s not
what they’re doing to us. It’s what we’re not doing. 50 percent drop out. Look,
we’re raising our own ingrown immigrants. These people are fighting hard to be
ignorant. There’s no English being spoken, and they’re walking and they’re
angry. Oh God, they’re angry and they have pistols and they shoot and they do
stupid things. And after they kill somebody, they don’t have a plan. Just murder
somebody. Boom. Over what? A pizza? And then run to the poor cousin’s house.

They sit there and the cousin says, “What are you doing here?”

“I just killed
somebody, man.”

“What?”

“I just killed somebody; I’ve got to stay here.”

“No,
you don’t.”

“Well, give me some money, I’ll go….”

“Where are you going?”

“North
Carolina.”

Everybody wanted to go to North Carolina. But the police know where
you’re going because your cousin has a record.

Five or six different children -- same
woman, eight, ten different husbands or whatever. Pretty soon you’re going to
have to have DNA cards so you can tell who you’re making love to. You don’t who
this is. It might be your grandmother. I’m telling you, they’re young
enough. Hey, you have a baby when you’re twelve. Your baby turns thirteen and
has a baby, how old are you? Huh? Grandmother. By the time you’re twelve, you
could have sex with your grandmother, you keep those numbers coming. I’m just
predicting.

I’m saying Brown versus the Board of
Education. We’ve got to hit the streets, ladies and gentlemen. I’m winding up,
now -- no more applause. I’m saying, look at the Black Muslims. There are Black
Muslims standing on the street corners and they say so forth and so on, and
we’re laughing at them because they have bean pies and all that, but you don’t
read, “Black Muslim gunned down while chastising drug dealer.” You don’t read
that. They don’t shoot down Black Muslims. You understand me. Muslims tell you
to get out of the neighborhood. When you want to clear your neighborhood out,
first thing you do is go get the Black Muslims, bean pies and all.
And your neighborhood is then clear. The police can’t do it.

I’m telling you Christians, what’s
wrong with you? Why can’t you hit the streets? Why can’t you clean it out
yourselves? It’s our time now, ladies and gentlemen. It is our time.
And I’ve got good news for you. It’s not about money. It’s about you doing
something ordinarily that we do -- get in somebody else’s business. It’s time for
you to not accept the language that these people are speaking, which will take
them nowhere. What the hell good is Brown v. Board of Education if nobody wants
it?

What is it with young girls getting
after some girl who wants to still remain a virgin. Who are these sick black
people and where did they come from and why haven’t they been parented to shut
up? To go up to girls and try to get a club where “you are nobody....” This is a
sickness, ladies and gentlemen, and we are not paying attention to these children.
These are children. They don’t know anything. They don’t have anything. They’re
homeless people. All they know how to do is beg. And you give it to them, trying
to win their friendship. And what are they good for? And then they stand there
in an orange suit and you drop to your knees: “He didn’t do
anything. He didn’t do anything.” Yes, he did do it. And you need to have an
orange suit on, too.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I want to
thank you for the award -- and giving me an opportunity to speak
because, I mean, this is the future, and all of these people who lined up and
done -- they’ve got to be wondering what the hell happened. Brown V. Board of
Education -- these people who marched and were hit in the face with rocks and
punched in the face to get an education and we got these knuckleheads walking
around who don’t want to learn English. I know that you all know it. I
just want to get you as angry that you ought to be. When you walk around the
neighborhood and you see this stuff, that stuff’s not funny. These people are
not funny anymore. And that‘s not my brother. And that’s not my sister. They’re
faking and they’re dragging me way down because the state, the city, and all
these people have to pick up the tab on them because they don’t want to accept
that they have to study to get an education.

We have to begin to build in the
neighborhood, have restaurants, have cleaners, have pharmacies, have real
estate, have medical buildings instead of trying to rob them all. And so, ladies
and gentlemen, please, Dorothy Height, where ever she’s sitting, she didn’t do
all that stuff so that she could hear somebody say “I can’t stand algebra, I
can’t stand…" and “what you is.” It’s horrible.

Basketball players --
multimillionaires can’t write a paragraph. Football players, multimillionaires,
can’t read. Yes. Multimillionaires. Well, Brown v. Board of Education, where are
we today? It’s there. They paved the way. What did we do with it? The White Man,
he’s laughing -- got to be laughing. 50 percent drop out -- rest of them in prison.

You got to tell me that if there was
parenting -- help me -- if there was parenting, he wouldn’t have picked up the Coca
Cola bottle and walked out with it to get shot in the back of the head. He
wouldn’t have. Not if he loved his parents. And not if they were parenting! Not
if the father would come home. Not if the boy hadn’t dropped the sperm cell
inside of the girl and the girl had said, “No, you have to come back here and be
the father of this child.” Not ..“I don’t have to.”

Therefore, you have the pile up of
these sweet beautiful things born by nature -- raised by no one. Give them
presents. You’re raising pimps. That’s what a pimp is. A pimp will act nasty to
you so you have to go out and get them something. And then you bring it back and
maybe he or she hugs you. And that’s why pimp is so famous. They’ve got a drink
called the “Pimp-something.” You all wonder what that’s about, don’t you? Well,
you’re probably going to let Jesus figure it out for you. Well, I’ve
got something to tell you about Jesus. When you go to the church, look at the
stained glass things of Jesus. Look at them. Is Jesus smiling? Not in one
picture. So, tell your friends. Let’s try to do something. Let’s try to make
Jesus smile. Let’s start parenting. Thank you, thank you.